The fate of labor in the era of great changes: (3) Malicious wage demands and aging

Recently, a video circulating on the Internet shows a worker hanging a rope on the outer wall of a residential building with a slogan, the content is "Sunac Jiatule pays back my wages and my hard-earned money", and two turtles are also drawn at the end. . Judging from the content of the slogan alone, this is another performance art of migrant workers asking for wages, and the targets of the accusation are Sunac and Jiatule. According to people familiar with the matter, the building where the incident occurred is Wuhan Sunac Guanlan Mansion, and Jiatule is a building decoration supplier of Sunac. That is to say, under the structure of layers of arrears, it is the construction workers at the bottom who bear the bitter fruit of the real estate crisis in the end.

real estate crisis

Sunac is the fourth largest real estate developer in China, but due to its extremely high asset-liability ratio and the influence of the "three red lines" regulatory policy, Sunac has fallen into a serious cash flow crisis and is gradually becoming the next Evergrande. In April of this year, Sunac’s sales fell sharply by 60% year-on-year. Without sales, it would not be able to repay its debts. In May, Sunac issued an announcement saying that it was unable to pay interest on four dollar debts, totaling $104 million. The non-payment of debts and interest shows that Sunac is "powerless" for US dollar debt, and the domestic fundamentals are also in crisis. Some projects have been suspended, and there is a risk of unfinished business. For example, it is located in the core area of Jinshui District, Zhengzhou City. The Sunac Orchid Garden will enter a state of shutdown or "performance construction" in 2021, and it is likely to be unfinished, at least it will not be delivered as scheduled, resulting in more than 2,000 owners who are burdened with mortgages but unable to collect the building, which is a dilemma.

In addition to the owners, the decoration enterprises in the downstream of the real estate industry are also dragged down by the debt crisis. Due to the slow account receivable cycle and the intensified liquidity pressure, they face operating difficulties, or lose money, or go bankrupt, or go bankrupt. For example, in July this year, Grandland Group, which renovated Evergrande, held 3.2 billion IOUs and had no way to collect debts. It also fell into financial crisis and owed the bank a total of 2.6 billion that could not be repaid. In addition, Grandland was also sued by downstream building materials suppliers in court. , was enforced more than 50 million assets.

More unfortunate is the contractor of the Evergrande project, which is the most concentrated area of bankruptcy in the Evergrande debt crisis . According to incomplete statistics, Nantong Sixth Construction, Yunnan Road Construction, Jackie Chan Construction, Zhejiang Sishun Construction, Yiye Construction, Henan Expressway Development and Chongqing Yuanfei Construction have successively announced bankruptcy and reorganization. Most of the real estate industry adopts a high-leverage development model. For example, to develop a real estate of 10 billion yuan, the real estate company will only invest 2 billion of its own funds, and the rest will rely on bank loans and pre-sale, but the pre-sale money will be deposited in a supervisory account. , the floors are not capped, the real estate companies can’t get the money, and there is still a gap of 5 billion in the construction of the 10 billion real estate. What should I do? Let the contractor bring capital to enter the venue, the contractor builds high-rise buildings, and all the investment is in advance. When the building is capped, the pre-sale money is returned, and the real estate company will give the contractor money. However, because a large number of real estate projects are unfinished, the contractors, like the owners, are unable to advance or retreat. If they continue to build, the real estate developers will not necessarily give the pre-sale funds to the contractors when the roof is capped. The end result is that a large number of contractors go out of business.

From last year to this year, due to the exhaustion of real estate developers' cash flow, a large number of unfinished buildings appeared in Wuhan and Zhengzhou. Hundreds of real estate owners across the country announced the suspension of loans, which profoundly exposed the chain crisis caused by the high-leverage development of the real estate industry. According to incomplete statistics, from January to May 2022, 18 decoration companies across the country have declared bankruptcy, and 9 of them have been owed material suppliers since 2020, resulting in lawsuits involving ceramic tiles, boards, cabinets, lamps and lanterns. , stone, glass and other products. Sunac and Jiatule mentioned at the beginning of this article are typical examples of layers of arrears, which transmit the pressure to the workers at the bottom, and "return my hard-earned money" becomes their last cry.

Layer by layer subcontracting

The problem of wage arrears has always been a chronic problem in the real estate and construction industry. From the beginning of Wen Jiabao's request for wages for Xiong Deming, a farmer in Chongqing, governments at all levels from the central to local governments have taken various measures over the years to try to solve them. The Supreme Court even included the crime of "refusal to pay labor remuneration". The Criminal Law has also promulgated judicial interpretations, but the reality is that the problem of arrears of wages is difficult to return, often because the old wages are not fully recovered, and new arrears arise. The reasons for this situation are complicated. The research of sociologists believes that there is a close relationship between the subcontracting system of the construction industry and the arrears of wages.

After layers of subcontracting, the construction site has formed a temporary pyramid-like hierarchical management system. The real estate enterprise is located at the top of the entire subcontracting system and is the initiator of the entire construction project, but it basically does not participate in the actual construction work. , but through tendering and other forms to contract to one or more construction companies. After a construction company undertakes a specific construction project, it will only partially participate in the management work. The specific production tasks are often decomposed and subcontracted to a secondary construction company, which will then be subcontracted to a special labor service company or a separate labor contracting team. . Labor service companies or contracting teams either directly recruit management workers or find smaller contractors.

After this kind of subcontracting, the foreman often becomes the direct manager of the construction project, and is fully responsible for the formulation of specific production plans, the assignment of work tasks, and the supervision of project quality. Finally, and most importantly, the contractor is also partially or fully responsible for the settlement of wages after the project is completed. In this sense, the construction workers are actually facing the contractor for wages, but the “boss” subjectively considered by the workers is actually at the bottom of the capital chain with staggered levels, and the real labor relationship is obscured.

Moreover, the construction industry has always used the production method of rural labor contracting teams, which is separated from the normal labor system of the country . The most notable sign is that a large number of construction workers engaged in front-line work do not sign labor contracts, and even if they sign a blank contract, it has no substantial legal effect. . The consequence of construction workers not having a labor contract is that they cannot establish a labor relationship with the actual employer. Therefore, they cannot protect their rights in accordance with the law when encountering labor disputes such as wage arrears and work-related injuries . When workers go to the labor department for help, the response they get is often "What the hell are you doing?" Is there a labor contract? If there is no labor contract, there will be no labor relationship.” The meaning behind it is “if there is no labor relationship, it will not be under our control.”

Difficulty getting paid

Because the construction industry has become a blind spot for the implementation of the "Labor Contract Law", when construction workers are desperate, they can only resort to various performance art methods such as jumping off the building, climbing tower cranes, cutting off water and electricity, and holding up signs to block the road. incidents of violent conflict of varying degrees. These situations reflect their helplessness and powerlessness, and also reflect the inaction of labor inspections . Statistics from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security over the past ten years show that the labor inspection department is rapidly becoming lazy and political , which is manifested in the reduction of labor dispute cases and the reduction in the number of active inspections of enterprises. The number of labor contracts signed and the amount of social security supervised and paid have also experienced a serious decline in performance. The actual situation should be able to serve as circumstantial evidence for this judgment. As long as the labor inspection department can actively intervene and provide assistance, the worker at the beginning of this article will not be able to hang tens of meters in the air to brush slogans, which will bring serious risks to his life and safety. .

In view of the seriousness of the problem of wage arrears of migrant workers, China has implemented a wage guarantee system in the real estate construction field since 2016, which is used to pay the wages of migrant workers who are in arrears in their projects. Back-up safeguards . For example, Zhengzhou stipulates that construction companies should deposit security funds before starting construction. Local companies store 0.75% of the total cost of a single project, while the storage ratio of non-local companies is 1.5%. In addition, construction companies have promised to implement the three systems of real-name information management, special accounts for migrant workers' wages, and banks to pay wages on behalf of the project, and the wage security fund for migrant workers can be reduced by half.

In 2021, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security will issue the "Regulations on Wage Deposits for Migrant Workers in the Field of Engineering and Construction" to further standardize issues such as account opening, storage entities, proportions, and forms. Enterprises with no less than 1%, no more than 3%, and no salary arrears for 2 consecutive years, the new project storage ratio will be reduced by 50%; 3 years of non-payment is exempt from storage. Correspondingly, the storage ratio of enterprises with unpaid wages in the first two years will increase by more than 50%; if they are included in the “blacklist” of unpaid wages, they will increase by more than 100%. According to this provision, in the event of arrears of wages, the Human Resources and Social Security Department shall make an administrative decision to order the payment within a time limit or to make payment first. If the general contractor of the construction refuses to perform at the due date, the local human resources and social security department may issue a Notice of Payment of Migrant Workers' Wage Deposit to the bank, and the bank will directly pay the corresponding amount of money from the salary deposit account to the unpaid migrant workers.

Theoretically, the wage guarantee system protects the interests of migrant workers to a certain extent and scope, but in implementation, migrant workers still face considerable challenges, especially when they go through formal labor dispute resolution procedures. Moreover, when the systemic crisis in real estate came, a large number of contractors went bankrupt, the amount of wages owed was huge, and the wage guarantee was a drop in the bucket. However, in June 2022, in order to coordinate the prevention and control of the epidemic and economic and social development, the State Council announced to suspend the storage of migrant workers' wage deposits for a period from July 1 to September 30, 2022, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Development and Reform Commission announced in September to encourage localities Continue to extend the holdover period after it expires. This means that during the epidemic, the government's policies tended to reduce the burden on enterprises, while shifting the consequences of wage arrears to migrant workers.

Due to the complicated and high cost of rights protection procedures according to law, construction workers often take unavoidable actions such as jumping off buildings, climbing tower cranes, and brushing slogans. When the public opinion environment is relaxed, media reports can bring pressure to developers and construction companies who have arrears. Drive problem solving. However, in recent years, due to the increased pressure on the government to maintain stability, the risk of migrant workers' rights protection has also increased. Not only will they not be able to receive the wages they receive, but they will be subject to administrative detention or even criminal detention by the police in the name of "malicious wage demands".

For example, before and after the Spring Festival in 2021, construction workers were detained for demanding wages in many parts of the country. On January 5, 2021, in Nanxiong, Guangdong, many workers threatened to jump off the building to demand payment for the project, and one worker was sentenced to 15 days Administrative detention; on January 15, Xiamen, Fujian, a construction site owed 350,000 yuan in wages to 22 workers, one of whom climbed a tower crane to ask for wages, and was later punished by public security; January 20, in Shantou, Guangdong, a construction site owed workers 100 yuan in wages. More than 10,000 yuan, the workers organized a group demonstration to ask for wages, and seven people were sentenced to administrative detention; on February 2, in Shantou, Guangdong, a worker was threatened with jumping off a building for being owed construction funds and was sentenced to administrative detention for 5 days; on February 5, Gannan, Gansu Province, A foreman climbed a 50-meter tower crane and threatened the person in charge of the construction site to jump off the building to ask for wages. The project money involved the wages of 38 migrant workers, and he was detained for 10 days for “disturbing social security order”; on February 8, Wuzhou, Guangxi, 4 people asking for wages Asked the contractor for wages, and two of them maliciously demanded wages by smashing their property and were detained administratively.

It is precisely because of the failure of the existing legal remedy mechanism that migrant workers turn to collective or extreme methods to safeguard their rights, but this action triggers the government's stability maintenance mechanism, and thus is caught in a dilemma. For migrant workers, various rights-defense performance art can be regarded as a "weapon of the weak", its purpose is to transmit pressure to the contractors or developers, and then promote the solution of the problem; but government officials have always regarded social stability as their primary achievement. The goal is that, within a certain tolerance range, the pressure of migrant workers to defend their rights can be transformed into an impetus for the government to help recover unpaid wages. However, if the problem is beyond the ability of the grass-roots officials to solve the problem, such as the amount of unpaid wages is particularly large or the unit with arrears is a government project, the rights protection behavior of migrant workers will easily evolve into the pressure of maintaining stability, and they will not be able to get money and will be detained. destiny.

With the intensification of China's real estate crisis and the deterioration of the financial situation of local governments, cash flow difficulties are passed on to the bottom construction workers through the pyramid-like subcontracting system. , how to protect their rights and interests is an issue that needs urgent attention.

Especially now that the aging trend of construction workers is obvious, their bargaining power in the labor market is weakened, and accidents such as overwork, work-related injuries and even sudden death are more likely to occur during the labor process. According to statistics from the Jiangsu Construction Worker Real-Name Information Management Service Platform, among the existing 5.6 million construction workers, construction workers aged 18-40, 40-50, and 50-65 account for about 29% respectively. , 23%, 48%. In the next decade, nearly half, or about 2.1 million, construction workers will be over the age of 60. So many farmers who have reached the retirement age will no longer be able to "legally" engage in construction work, because this year, Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenzhen, Nanchang and other places have issued regulations on the employment of over-aged migrant workers in the construction industry, that is, prohibiting those under the age of 18. , Three categories of personnel over the age of 60 and women over the age of 50 enter the construction site to engage in construction operations; male workers over the age of 55 and female workers over the age of 45 are prohibited from entering the construction site to engage in underground, high-altitude, high temperature, particularly heavy physical labor or other physical effects. Health and special work with high risk and high risk.

Under this trend, if the working conditions of the real estate construction industry are not improved and the problem of wage arrears is completely solved, there will be fewer and fewer young people willing to engage in the construction and decoration industries in the future. In this sense, while China's real estate industry has become the focus of the world's attention, the situation and fate of Chinese construction workers at the bottom of the capital chain need more care, because China's urbanization is the result of their poor quality. The yellow hard hat, wearing a tattered camouflage uniform, carrying a shovel, carrying a tile knife, swaying sweat and building in the dust. However, when the crisis comes, they often become the ultimate victims. In this regard, the constant appearance of "pay back my hard-earned money" is the greatest shame of "Chinese-style modernization".